Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Publication modalities ‘article in press’ and ‘open access’ in relation to journal average citation

  • Published:
Scientometrics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

There has been a generalization in the use of two publication practices by scientific journals during the past decade: (1) ‘article in press’ or early view, which allows access to the accepted paper before its formal publication in an issue; (2) ‘open access’, which allows readers to obtain it freely and free of charge. This paper studies the influence of both publication modalities on the average impact of the journal and its evolution over time. It tries to identify the separate effect of access on citation into two major parts: early view and selection effect, managing to provide some evidence of the positive effect of both. Scopus is used as the database and CiteScore as the measure of journal impact. The prevalence of both publication modalities is quantified. Differences in the average impact factor of group of journals, according to their publication modalities, are tested. The evolution over time of the citation influence, from 2011 to 2016, is also analysed. Finally, a linear regression to explain the correlation of these publication practices with the CiteScore in 2016, in a ceteris paribus context, is estimated. Our main findings show evidence of a positive correlation between average journal impact and advancing the publication of accepted articles, moreover this correlation increases over time. The open access modality, in a ceteris paribus context, also correlates positively with average journal impact.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Al, U., & Soydal, I. (2017). Publication lag and early view effects in information science journals. Aslib Journal of Information Management, 69(2), 118–130.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Alves-Silva, E., Porto, A. C. F., Firmino, C., Silva, H. V., Becker, I., Resende, L., et al. (2016). Are the impact factor and other variables related to publishing time in ecology journals? Scientometrics, 108(3), 1445–1453.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Antelman, K. (2004). Do open-access articles have a greater research impact? College & Research Libraries, 65(5), 372–382.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Björk, B. C., & Solomon, D. (2012). Open access versus subscription journals: A comparison of scientific impact. BMC Medicine, 10(1), 73.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Craig, I. D., Plume, A. M., McVeigh, M. E., Pringle, J., & Amin, M. (2007). Do open access articles have greater citation impact? A critical review of the literature. Journal of Informetrics, 1(3), 239–248.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Davis, P. M., Lewenstein, B. V., Simon, D. H., Booth, J. G., & Connolly, M. J. (2008). Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: Randomised controlled trial. British Medical Journal, 337(7665), 343–345.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davis, P. M., & Walters, W. H. (2011). The impact of free access to the scientific literature: A review of recent research. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 99(3), 208.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dorta-González, P., & Dorta-González, M. I. (2013). Comparing journals from different fields of science and social science through a JCR subject categories normalized impact factor. Scientometrics, 95(2), 645–672.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dorta-González, P., Dorta-González, M. I., & Suárez-Vega, R. (2015). An approach to the author citation potential: Measures of scientific performance which are invariant across scientific fields. Scientometrics, 102(2), 1467–1496.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dorta-González, P., González-Betancor, S. M., & Dorta-González, M. I. (2017). Reconsidering the gold open access citation advantage postulate in a multidisciplinary context: An analysis of the subject categories in the Web of Science database 2009–2014. Scientometrics, 112(2), 877–901.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dorta-González, P., & Santana-Jiménez, Y. (2018). Prevalence and citation advantage of gold open access in the subject areas of the Scopus database. Research Evaluation, 27(1), 1–15.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Echeverría, M., Stuart, D., & Cordón-García, J.-A. (2017). The influence of online posting dates on the bibliometric indicators of scientific articles. Revista Española de Documentación Científica, 40(3), e183.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Eysenbach, G. (2006). Citation advantage of open access articles. PLoS Biology, 4(5), e157.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Larivière, V., Gingras, Y., Carr, L., Brody, T., et al. (2010). Self-selected or mandated, open access increases citation impact for higher quality research. PLoS ONE, 5(10), e13636.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gaule, P., & Maystre, N. (2011). Getting cited: Does open access help? Research Policy, 40(10), 1332–1338.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallières, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y., et al. (2004). The access/impact problem and the green and gold roads to open access. Serials Review, 30(4), 310–314.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Joint, N. (2009). The Antaeus column: Does the “open access” advantage exist? A librarian’s perspective. Library Review, 58(7), 477–481.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Koler-Povh, T., Južnič, P., & Turk, G. (2014). Impact of open access on citation of scholarly publications in the field of civil engineering. Scientometrics, 98(1033), 1033–1045.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kurtz, M. J., Eichhorn, G., Accomazzi, A., Grant, C., Demleitner, M., Henneken, E., et al. (2005). The effect of use and access on citations. Information Processing and Management, 41(6), 1395–1402.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lawrence, S. (2001). Free online availability substantially increases a paper’s impact. Nature, 411(6837), 521–522.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Li, Y., Wu, C., Yan, E., & Li, K. (2018). Will open access increase journal CiteScores? An empirical investigation over multiple disciplines. PLoS ONE, 13(8), e0201885.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Luwel, M., & Moed, H. F. (1998). Publication delays in the science field and their relationship to the ageing of scientific literature. Scientometrics, 41(1–2), 29–40.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McKiernan, E., Bourne, P., Brown, C., Buck, S., Kenall, A., Lin, J., et al. (2016). How open science helps researchers succeed. elife, 5, e16800.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Moed, H. F. (2007). The effect of open access on citation impact: An analysis of ArXiv’s condensed matter section. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(13), 2047–2054.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Niyazov, Y., Vogel, C., Price, R., Lund, B., Judd, D., Akil, A., et al. (2016). Open access meets discoverability: Citations to articles posted to Academia.edu. PLoS ONE, 11(2), e0148257.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Norris, M., Oppenheim, C., & Rowland, F. (2008). The citation advantage of open-access articles. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(12), 1963–1972.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Piwowar, H., Priem, J., Larivière, V., Alperin, J. P., Matthias, L., Norlander, B., et al. (2018). The state of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of open access articles. PeerJ, 6, e4375.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Prosser, D. (2003). Institutional repositories and open access: The future of scholarly communication. Information Services and Use, 23(2), 167–170.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shi, D., Rousseau, R., Yang, L., & Li, J. (2017). A journal’s impact factor is influenced by changes in publication delays of citing journals. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 68(3), 780–789.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Simpson, E. H. (1951). The interpretation of interaction in contingency tables. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Methodological), 13(2), 238–241.

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Solomon, D. J., Laakso, M., & Björk, B. C. (2013). A longitudinal comparison of citation rates and growth among open access journals. Journal of Informetrics, 7(3), 642–650.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tennant, J. P., Waldner, F., Jacques, D. C., Masuzzo, P., Collister, L. B., & Hartgerink, C. H. (2016). The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: An evidence-based review. F1000 Research, 5, 632.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tort, A. B. L., Targino, Z. H., & Amaral, O. B. (2012). Rising publication delays inflate journal impact factors. PLoS ONE, 7(12), e53374.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wang, X., Liu, C., Mao, W., & Fang, Z. (2015). The open access advantage considering citation, article usage and social media attention. Scientometrics, 103(2), 555–564.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yu, G., Wang, X.-H., & Yu, D.-R. (2005). The influence of publication delays on impact factors. Scientometrics, 64(2), 235–246.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yule, G. U. (1903). Notes on the theory of association of attributes in statistics. Biometrika, 2(2), 121–134.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Métodos Cuantitativos en Economía y Gestión, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Campus de Tafira, 35017, Las Palmas, Spain

    Sara M. González-Betancor

  2. TiDES Research Institute, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Campus de Tafira, 35017, Las Palmas, Spain

    Pablo Dorta-González

Authors
  1. Sara M. González-Betancor
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Pablo Dorta-González
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sara M. González-Betancor.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

González-Betancor, S.M., Dorta-González, P. Publication modalities ‘article in press’ and ‘open access’ in relation to journal average citation. Scientometrics 120, 1209–1223 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03156-2

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03156-2

Keywords

Search

Navigation